In smaller cities and middle-income regions across the globe, even the best ideas and most promising new businesses can die on the vine for lack of access to markets and capital. Those regions need new forms of innovation financing to prosper in an age of globalized commerce.

Startups in Springfield (MA) sell to global markets at a surprisingly high rate. Founders in Albuquerque and New Orleans enjoy supportive local cultures. Reno and Fresno welcome entrepreneurs from elsewhere. Hartford has high shares of female and immigrant founders.

The aerospace industry has always been a difficult market for start-ups to break into, going all the way back to Glenn Curtiss and the surprisingly litigious Wright Brothers. Today, the challenge doesn’t come from intellectual property or competing with giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin—there’s an entire supply chain feeding those behemoths, after all.

Food shopping is one of the last major holdouts to online retail. Groceries are unique in that their inventory is perishable, fragile and heavy. Grocery customers often shop at the last minute, like to see the food they are about to eat and don’t want to pay high delivery fees.

Investors are flocking to Middle American cities like Omaha and Des Moines. Startups are forgoing the paradisiacal pastures of California for a little Midwestern mojo. And the “Silicon Prairie” — cornfields and all — is having a moment in the unrelenting sun.

The economic engine of Silicon Valley seems to have driven right by the Midwest. America’s urban coastal cities have enjoyed an explosion in their technology sectors. New York’s Silicon Alley and Boston’s biotech corridor are world-class incubators of talent and startups. Austin (Texas), Seattle (Washington), Washington, D.C, and even Miami Beach claim a piece of the digital economy (and Silicon-something monikers).

When ClassPass was looking to open a third office outside of its New York and San Francisco locations, it decided on Missoula, Montana — a location that doesn’t usually top the lists of the best cities for tech startups.

Different approaches that can help to further advance the way ideas are sourced, shared, scoped and shepherded through the innovation process, so that public sector organizations can improve the yield of ideas moving through their pipelines.

The cities that I’ve chosen as ones to watch aren’t necessarily those that are home to the most startup activity. Rather, entrepreneurs, investors, or government leaders in the city have proven nimble in identifying what resources tech entrepreneurs will need to grow in their city. Or they’ve dedicated themselves to becoming leaders in a niche technology sector that they think will revolutionize American life. And finally, many of these cities are also home to a promising number of tech startups.

For the moment, the startup is more of a vehicle customizer than a true manufacturer. It rips the diesel motor and related innards out of an existing vehicle and replaces them with an electric motor and batteries.

The idea — far grander than the money itself, which is only $150 million to start, pocket money for most of the investors — was to assemble a dream team and create a network effect for entrepreneurs in the middle of the country to align with the biggest names in business.

Through the partnership, known as TitletownTech, the Packers and Microsoft will each contribute $5 million to invest in startups from around Wisconsin. This is part of a larger initiative by Microsoft called TechSpark to form similar partnerships in North Dakota, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming.

For small cities that want to build a thriving tech hub, the first step is getting more startups to set up shop. But the second, sometimes trickier step is getting Millennials to come to town to work for said startups.

It’s part of the world’s most well-known innovation ecosystem where tech start-ups with the next big idea rub shoulders with market leading tech giants. Creativity isn’t limited to the office; it also spills on to the streets to create a diverse cultural scene.

As Detroit bounces back from municipal bankruptcy, regional leaders are also betting that small businesses can help fuel a recovery that extends to neighborhoods and entrepreneurs historically disconnected from regional growth.

There’s a hidden diamond in the Midwest that contains an economy larger than California. Chicago to Detroit, down through Cleveland to Pittsburgh, bending through Columbus to Cincinnati, and coming full circle through Indianapolis back to Chicago.

Sometimes significant news doesn’t make much of a splash, and that was the case for a major transaction last week. PetSmart Inc. announced the acquisition of Chewy.com LLC for $3.35 billion, the largest e-commerce deal ever. Also notable is that Chewy.com, which sells pet products online, is based near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, rather than San Francisco or Seattle or New York.

Staples is targeting a market that, while now trendy, it still considers neglected: small businesses, from independent contractors who patronize co-working offices to entrepreneurs on Main Street and in Silicon Valley.

Political and economic dynamics are forcing companies and investors to pay more attention to business activity in middle America, where many workers feel left out of the booming economies of the coastal cities (think San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, New York and Boston.) Following the recession, start-up formation stalled outside of the big tech hubs like Silicon Valley. But activity has picked up over the past two years, with midwestern cities gaining momentum.

The 19th-century brick mill buildings lining the Merrimack River in this city of 110,000 seem an unlikely choice for the headquarters of Dyn, an internet performance company whose clients include Twitter, Netflix and Zappos.

Department of Community and Economic Development Secretary Dennis Davin today announced the approval of $15 million in tax credits to support 263 early-stage companies through the Keystone Innovation Zone (KIZ) Program.

In today's technology driven world, innovation districts are growing in their importance. Some public policy leaders believe that innovation districts are only for life sciences or information technology companies, but this could not be further from the truth.

This week, MIT is launching a separate entity called The Engine. From its headquarters a few blocks from our campus, it will offer tough-tech innovators a distinctive package of “patient capital,” affordable local space, access to highly specialized equipment, streamlined legal and business services, and technical expertise, from prototype to scale-up.

In terms of economic impact, some schools are household names. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, and a handful of other elite universities dominate the business news with multimillion-dollar corporate partnerships and blockbuster startups spurred by star faculty, students, and alumni.

The proposal, which does not require congressional approval, would allow immigration officials to admit entrepreneurs case by case. To qualify, an applicant must have an “active and central role,” and a significant ownership stake, in an American company founded in the last three years.

Voxpro, an Ireland-based innovative customer experience and tech support provider, will create more than 500 jobs by 2020 and invest $4 million in a new Center of Excellence in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia.

Early-stage companies are defined as those in business fewer than five years — less than 10 if spun off from a university — with fewer than 100 employees and valued at less than $10 million. They also have to be headquartered in Michigan, with most of their employees working here.

Biotechnology has always been a risky, expensive gamble that forces many entrepreneurs to scramble for the seed money that finances early-stage research. But ZATA’s experience is the kind of struggle that has some Worcester business officials wondering if the region has all the tools needed to support nascent businesses.

Most people don’t realize Toronto is the fourth-largest city in North America (only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are larger) and produces the most engineering-focused university graduates each year.

Aside from the general machinations with which every city must deal—schools, utilities, crime, etc.—the single effort, the single desire that seems to unite modern cities is the idea that local prosperity and economic invigoration can be realized through nurturing a movement that lures and retains tech companies, engineers and founders.

We are at the dawn of an extraordinary technological revolution and it is transforming every part of the U.S. economy. Innovation That Matters examines and ranks 25 cities’ readiness to capitalize on the inevitable shift to a digital economy.

Plural Additive Manufacturing, a startup company providing industrial solutions for additive manufacturing and rapid prototyping, opened opening its new operations facility at 6455 Lakeview Blvd in Lake Oswego, Oregon. The office and production areas will support the US market with equipment and services for a new generation of industrial 3D printing and Additive Manufacturing systems.

To adapt to the current frenetic pace of innovation, corporations have created a new organizational structure called the Innovation Outpost. They are placing these outposts at the center of the source of innovation: startup ecosystems.

With the entrepreneurial ecosystem expanding from coast to coast, venture investors deployed capital to 3,662 companies located in 133 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) in 2015, according to the MoneyTree™ Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data from Thomson Reuters.

It doesn’t take too many conversations with locals to realize that New Orleans has no interest in becoming San Francisco — but rather than stymying innovation, it’s that fierce sense of identity that has driven New Orleans in the post-Katrina era.

Just as with software 15 years ago, start-up manufacturing is beginning to graduate to the bigger time. New tools, resources, and intermediaries are allowing a new generation of serious entrepreneurs to begin to bridge the worlds of hacker space and industry. As a result, software-enabled manufacturing start-ups are poised to have a large economic impact.

Silicon Valley's Sand Hill Road will forever be synonymous with venture capital. Yet the same forces driving the current innovation cycle have also democratized innovation itself, meaning that Silicon Valley no longer has a lock on the best new ideas. As innovation and entrepreneurship have become globalized, so too has opportunity &#151; to the point where exciting venture-backed companies are emerging from cities such as Bangalore, Berlin, London and Shanghai.

When it comes to innovation, place matters. Not necessarily because of proximity to facilities or investors (though those are lovely to have, of course), but because creativity is almost always a group endeavor -- big ideas are the product not of one big brain, but of many ideas pinging between several smart people.

The tech boom has diffused beyond the traditional hotbeds in California, New York, and Massachusetts, across the the entire United States. Other states are home to well-funded and well-known startups, including Jet (New Jersey), LivingSocial (DC), and sports e-commerce company Fanatics (Florida). The less well-known include Minnesota-based Code42 Software, which has raised $137.5M in equity funding to date.

With its offices sporting wood flooring, a roof painted bright orange and conference rooms named after target markets in Southeast Asia, AppWorks, one of Taiwan’s few start-up accelerators, has the look and feel of the American counterparts it’s modeled on.

The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce is one of the most influential business groups in the state, but it has largely missed out on one of the fastest-growing segments of the local economy: the startup and venture capital communities.

NextFab Studio plans to expand operations and open a “makerspace” in downtown Wilmington, Delaware. The project received assistance from a $350,000 Delaware Strategic Fund grant recently approved by the Council on Development Finance.

Looking back on 2015, the Canadian startup ecosystem has had a number of reasons to celebrate, including Shopify’s initial public offering and several venture capital backed startups attracting major follow-on rounds. However, when it comes to startup success Canada still has a long way to go to catch up with the world’s top players.